{"id":111339,"date":"2017-02-09T08:30:57","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T13:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/?p=111339"},"modified":"2017-02-10T10:53:05","modified_gmt":"2017-02-10T15:53:05","slug":"tech-focus-intercoms-part-1-at-the-crossroads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.sportsvideo.org\/2017\/02\/09\/tech-focus-intercoms-part-1-at-the-crossroads\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Focus: Intercoms, Part 1 \u2014 At the Crossroads"},"content":{"rendered":"
Communications via intercom for small armies of production-crew members on sports broadcasts systems is a hugely complex undertaking, and new tech platforms coming to market are designed to make it efficient.<\/p>\n
The business side of intercom isn\u2019t simple, either. The past year has seen a number of significant M&A moves, including Clear-Com\u2019s purchase of Trilogy<\/a> and Riedel\u2019s acquisitions of Delec<\/a> and ASL Intercom. Like other M&A activity in broadcasting and in media in general, these moves are part of a response to a television industry nearing its next technical inflection points: networked IP and wireless distribution and related changes in workflow.<\/p>\n CoachComm, which designs, manufactures, and markets wireless intercom systems for sideline communications for collegiate sports, will exhibit its Pliant Technologies CrewCom<\/a> at NAB 2017. The new platform takes the most salient aspects of wired comms and puts them in a fully functioned wireless environment, with up to 200 full-duplex users and up to 1,024 conferences available without the need for a dedicated matrix.<\/p>\n \u201cUntil now, the wireless aspect of intercom has basically been an extension of the wired intercom,\u201d explains Pliant Global Sales Manager Gary Rosen. \u201cIn traditional intercom design, partyline systems have offered limited functionality but are simple to lay out and have high reliability; in a matrixed design, you have a lot of functionality but at significantly greater expense. [CrewCom] is more like traditional audio routing: with conferences, you can assign any single user, group of users, or external source to anyone on the system but without needing a matrix to do so. The CrewCom beltpacks allow direct control over four separate conferences at one time. The RF components on CrewNet work like a network appliance, so the system is not limited to any specific frequencies.\u201d<\/p>\n Category Drivers: At-Home Production and a Broader Sports Field Clear-Com\u2019s HelixNet networked system is targeting sports broadcasts at non-NCAA schools, according to Vinnie Macri, product outreach manager. \u201cColleges like the University of Hartford, UMass at Lowell, Eastern Michigan University [are] great schools, but they don\u2019t have the kind of budgets that the top-tier schools have as a result of deals with major broadcast networks,\u201d he notes. \u201cInstead, they\u2019re building remote production in Sprinter vans with HelixNet and Ross switchers for a half million dollars, a fraction of what the top-tier schools are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n That, says Macri, is building a foundation that leverages the internet and a campus-wide LAN infrastructure, which is already in place for a wide range of curricular and extracurricular activities, for a robust and competitive broadcast-sports universe full of content-hungry outlets, notably streaming and secondary cable channels.<\/p>\n He adds that the proliferation of interfaces that can convert an audio and video signal to an IP stream \u2014 such as Iptec\u2019s VNP series network processor<\/a>s<\/a>, which have been used along with HelixNet by several broadcast networks in proof-of-concept demonstrations \u2014 lay out an attainable architecture for these school\u2019s sports programs.<\/p>\n \u201cWith platforms like these,\u201d he explains, \u201cschools are networking their campuses, putting a broadcast center in the basketball arena, and producing football and soccer shows from there or sending the van out to another school, calling the show remotely using four channels of comms.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Two related and significant trends are affecting intercom development, deployment, and application: the shift to at-home\/REMI approaches to production and the growth of second and third tiers of collegiate sports. Both are putting more reliance on IP-based signal transport, the latter resorting more and more to the internet as its main infrastructure.<\/p>\n